Easy Minecraft Creeper Costume…that’s comfy to wear!

Mitch plays Minecraft. A lot. Let’s leave it at that. So, naturally, when we were kicking around ideas for a costume, he decided to be something Minecraft related. Like a Creeper. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go ask a kid. No, go ask a boy. He’ll talk your ear off about it.

When Mitch first wanted to be a Creeper for Halloween the game was pretty young and just getting started with spin-off merchandise and whatnot. Sure, you could find a Minecraft t-shirt at Target, but for some reason, not a costume. They’ve since flooded the toy aisle with Minecraft action figures, plushies and weapons…but I’m still not sure if you’re going to find an off the rack Minecraft costume yet.

Not that I like to buy costumes anyway.

I turned to the web and found many interesting costume ideas, but not many patterns. Mostly the creeper costumes involved sticking your kid in box, and believe me, the last thing you want is a six year old in a box. I wanted him to be able to run around on Halloween, not hop up and down in an uncomfortable costume!

I came up with something a little less authentic, but more flexible. A Creeper sweat suit. Mitch could not only Trick or Treat in this costume, but we took it to Boo at the Zoo and Grant’s Farm Halloween nights and actually…sit down. And ride the trams, trains and carousels. I thought that was a plus.

First, a warning: this costume is for Halloween, not a Comic Con. It’s not realistic. Heck, it’s not even straight in spots. But it is pretty easy to put together if you don’t mind hot gluing a few hundred squares of felt.

DIY Minecraft Creeper Costume

If a link takes you to Amazon, it’s an Affiliate Link, which means I get a little money to keep this blog online. 🙂

Supplies:

Sweat suit (old, second hand or cheap. Green would be awesome. Black will do.)

Acquire a square box. Cut off the bottom flaps (save the cardboard). We bought one from FedEx that claims to be 11×11 but was more like 11.5 by 12ish. Naturally, this box is larger than the 11×17 printout I hoped to use, but I came up with a solution. (More on that later.)

I made this on an ancient copy of Publisher and created a pdf. You’re welcome. Minecraft heads are 8×8 squares, but due to the odd size of my box I made this one a bit longer so you can wrap it around a wonky size. To adjust for the odd width of the box, I cut the white borders off the printout and taped them together like really expensive wrapping paper. You’ll tape together the face and FOUR sides. (And overlap the paper–I overlapped by a full square.)

What? Four sides? Yes. The extra sheet is needed if your box is a little over 10.5 inches wide. Trust me on this. The fifth “side” sheet is for the top.

Cut out one square in the black for eye holes. Place the printout on the box, trace the square and cut.

Wrap the paper around the box gift wrap style. Fold it around the inside edge. Tape. Tape. Tape.

Trim a piece for the top. Tape some more.

Ta Da!

Notice that inner ring in the box up there? Yeah, about that. See, if you put an 11×11 box on a six year old’s head, you end up with a kid that can’t see as it spins wildly around his head. So we taped the leftover flaps into a headband and taped it to the top of the box. Genius!

The headband is taped close to the face for better visibility.

Body

The body is pretty simple. You cut out lots of felt squares and glue all over the suit, more or less in straight lines. I’m not Martha Stewart here, so I’ll admit my suit has some…interesting bits. Just remember this is a Halloween costume and unless you’re competing for a $5000 prize, no one is going to care if there’s some squares that aren’t quite square. Besides, real humans are NOT square, so you’re going to run into trouble around arm pits and neck lines. Just do your best.

I started with a bottle of fabric glue for this project, but it takes too long to dry. And I tend to make costumes at best, 24 hours before they need to be worn. I switched to a glue gun for speed–the glue dries instantly and had a GREAT bond. Just dap glue in the four corners, anything more is overkill.

How much felt? Well, I used 30+ pieces of felt in five colors of green to cover a boy’s small hoodie and pants. You may need more. Or less.

I also used a random size for the squares, which happened to be the price tag of the felt. You could make your squares bigger and maybe get it done faster.

Don’t worry about straightness. Unless there’s prize money on the line. In that case, you should be reading someone else’s tutorial.

NOTE: I’ve also see the costume head done in paper. If you’re a scrapbooker and have leftover green paper, it might be cheaper to make the head from little paper squares glued to your box. Just use the printable as a guide for the face pattern!

Just wanted to follow up… As usual I didn’t start costume until night before Halloween. I think with this costume, I should have remembered that cutting out all the felt squares would take some time. But I got it done. I started with the glue gun, like you suggested, but as my time & patience started running short, I switched to the 3M Multi-Purpose Adhesive spray. It did an adequate job, but the glue gun works much better. If anyone plans to try the adhesive spray, I suggest taking the time to be sure the corners are sprayed well. If you don’t, the pieces will start to pull away at corners, in turn creating a pull on the whole piece, & your child will look like they are leaving a “breadcrumb trail” of felt wherever they go. LoL The Kinkos printing was actually the only part that was messed up. My printer was almost out of ink so i spent $18 for the Pros to print it. It was off color, bad. Took it back, the Kinko’s lady was able to adjust settings & print decent Creeper head pieces. As for inside the box head, I used foam piece I had around the house. Used spray adhesive & stuck it to the inside top. Shaved out small bit of the center, and doubled up the foam around the 4 sides of where his head would be. A note to keep in mind, the head will want to wobble twds the back, since the foam is set twds the front. Counterweighting is a good idea, though I’m not sure of how I would do it. The ball cap idea below, may resolve that issue. Wish I would have thought of it!! Everyone loved the costume. It feels great when your child likes their costume & you were able to show them that creativity & trying something new ends up being cooler than spending money on something that 8 other kids in their grade would be wearing! Thanks so much for posting this for all of us to see & use. I will be visiting your site often…no matter how far apart in miles…we moms (dads,too) gotta stick together! Keep up the good work & pat yourself on the back for helping so many of us out this Halloween. Thank you 🙂

Let me know what you come up with! My first thought was putting a piece of foam in there, but the my kid keeps making paper crowns, so we went with that method! Truthfully, I ended up carrying his head around most of the night at Grant’s Farm and he just put it on for photos! Trick or Treating should be interesting…

Hey! I found you over at the costume contest at The Grant Life! I LOVE this creeper costume. I entered our Minecraft Steve into the contest this year, lol. But, I’m getting ready to have a Minecraft bday party for my son and a Creeper costume would be so fun. Thanks for sharing, I think this is totally great! -Molly from Just a Little Creativity

Used the panty hoes piece over the mouth cut out. Wife picked up the sheer black ones. Taped the pieces on. Nice touch to make the mouth area darker.

I glued in 3×3″x6″ chunks of foam on the side/front/back inside so these sit nicely on my kid’s head. The square I put in the middle(top) was shaved a bit(a large kitchen knife works well to cut foam) for each kid accordingly.

We used a Fiskars rotary paper trimmer (Fiskars 199080-1002) to cut the ~900 2×2 felt squares to cover two jackets and pairs of pants for our kids. My wife was cutting the 2″ felt strips in three layers of felt per cut. Took a few hours to knock out ~900 tiles and a few more hours to mount the tiles.

I pre-sprayed both jackets and pairs of pants with 3M Super 77 spray adhesive to help the tiles stick.

I’d put about (36) tiles down on cardboard to spray them with 3M Super 77 spray adhesive. Then mount them on the articles immediately. This went pretty quick between my wife and I putting them down and they seem to be holding fine.

I used that Super 77 on the 12×12 boxes as well to mount the printable pattern on. We got the 12x12x18 fedex boxes and cut them down to 12″x12″X12″.Glued the flaps in and the bottom and put tape/weight on so they’d dry solid as I know these will see some play time after halloween.

I am so thankful that I found this post!! My son is going to be a Creeper this year and all we had was the head. I was going to do the cardboard box body, but frankly, it seemed like a lot of work, plus this will be SO much more comfortable! I have the backside of the pants left to do and then I will be done! My son is very excited to wear this costume! Again, thank you! You have made my little Aspergers boy very happy!

My son went as a creeper this year and we made it following your instructions, only I used square scraps of green fabric I already had. For the inside of the box we super glued an old baseball cap in it. This way the head was not moving around at all. This worked great.

The whole costume turned out great! He had high school kids stopping and asking to get a picture with him all night.

Hello cool weblog! Dude. Outstanding. Astounding. I’m going to take a note of your web site along with use the feeds furthermore? I am pleased to search out quite a few useful data here in the distribute, we end up needing grow far more strategies about this consider, appreciate spreading.

First of all THANK YOU so much for sharing the printable and you did a fantastic job on your son’s costume. I just finished printing the images out and hope you do not mind me sharing with your readers my experience using Acrobat Reader and standard size computer paper: a) Settings …. Copies: 1 / Page Scaling: Tile pages / Tile Scale: 100% / Overlap 0.5″ in. b) which will result in x4 tiles for each image (or page) c) resulting in a total of twenty-four pages in all that will have d) an approximate 2 1/4″ x 2 5/8″ border that you will trim off for piecing plus a tiny margin for matching each tile within its image.

Last but not least; ensure you have full cartridges of ink and sufficient paper. Clarity of your printed project will depend upon the type of paper used and your printer’s properties. (ie: glossy greeting card and printed at best or the highest dpi.) Shall also warn, try not to be interrupted during the process of printing as you will surely will loose track of what you’ve printed …. ☺ Hope my personal tips help. -Brenda- P.S: Am currently in the midst of putting it and a Steve’s head together for my grandson’s b/day party (for the use of photo ops) so am keeping my fingers crossed that both turn out. Thanks again!

Re my comment and update: As it turned out, as I could not find the correct size of box for the print outs I opted for a 10″ x 10″ x 10″ one (purchased at Staples) thus reinvented the print out by using an old photo editing program (still) using a poster format. Combined with a little experimenting the result was far less paper and ink used plus a better size of fit due to the smaller box. With that said, I do fully appreciate Denise’s inspiration as mission was finally accomplished. ☺ -Brenda-

This is the first tutorial I’ve found that isn’t a complete box costume! All I could think was, “How is he going to sit in class?! How is he going to walk properly at night?!” So thank you! It’s easy enough for even the non-diyer like myself.

Hi! My 6 year old is over the moon excited! It’s Halloween and last night my mom and I finished gluing on all the pieces to this awesome costume. I’m sure he will get a ton of compliments. I went ahead and bought the pre-made head from the costume store. I figured by the time I spent struggling with it and money for the box and a glossy print out, it would just be easier. This suit was fairly easy but very labor intensive and took awhile, lol! Thanks, this costume made my son’s day!

Tweet Me!

I’m an Amazon Affiliate

Hey guys! Missouri is now allowed to participate in the Amazon Affiliate program! So, just FYI: I'm a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.